President; Actor of Cinema

Tunnel to Freedom

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

Mission to Mir

This film shows how far we have come since the cold-war days of the 50s and 60s. Back then the Russians were our "enemies". And to them the Americans were their "enemies" who couldn't be trusted. Somewhere in all this a young girl in Oklahoma named Shannon set her sights on becoming one of those space explorers, even though she was told "girls can't do that." But she did.

The Hole In The Ground

Made at the height of 'cold war' paranoia, this drama-documentary shows the work of the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation, who's duties included the issuing of public warnings of any nuclear missile strike and the subsequent fallout.

Planning for Public Shelter Entry

The film features a meeting led by Dave Taylor, the shelter manager, discussing the protocols and responsibilities for staff members involved in managing a public shelter. Key participants, including operations deputy Harvey Johnson and health leader Mrs. Carter, outline their roles in ensuring a smooth entry for occupants during an emergency. The meeting emphasizes the importance of organization, communication, and the distribution of supplies. Staff members are encouraged to familiarize themselves with each other's duties and prepare for potential scenarios, including managing newcomers and ensuring safety and sanitation within the shelter.

Planning For Emergence From Public Shelters

A training film for public shelter managers explaining when people should be allowed to leave the shelter after a disaster.

Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter

A man named Walt who has recently completed building a fallout shelter in his home, a project initiated due to the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War era. Walt demonstrates to his friends the multi-functionality of the shelter, which can also serve as a darkroom, an extra bedroom, or a safe space during tornadoes. He explains the construction process in detail, emphasizing the need for precise measurements, proper leveling, and the use of concrete blocks for radiation protection. The shelter includes a stock of essentials like a radio, batteries, and a fire extinguisher. Walt’s narrative is interspersed with advice on obtaining official bulletins for guidance and the importance of building shelters correctly. The film concludes with a message from the Director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, advocating for the construction of family fallout shelters across America as a means of personal safety and national security in the nuclear age.

Public Shelter Supplies: What Does The Government Supply

Training film for shelter managers. Food, water, sanitation, medical, and radiation detection systems are explained.

Public Shelter Organization and Staff

Created in 1963 at the height of the Cold War, this Civil Defense training film uses a dramatic premise to show how emergency staff should manage and organize a large public fallout shelter during a crisis. A Shelter Manager is shown immediately taking control of the situation in the shelter, speaking calmly to those who have made it into the facility, closing the door promptly once the shelter is full, and sticking to the "shelter plan" as the situation unfolds. Some of the areas discussed in this nuclear war drama are the safety plan, regular inspections, supervised public entry into shelters, ventilation, first aid, sanitation, fire prevention, decontamination of personnel, and more. "Shelter living is different," the Manager states, "But we have a trained staff that will make your stay in this shelter livable for us all."

Operations in Public Shelters

A heavily dramatized Civil Defense film that demonstrates how a public fallout shelter is supposed to function after a nuclear attack. This scenario takes place in a fictional any town called "Middlebury". The film describes the situation in a public shelter in Middlebury following an attack on the United States.

Information Program Within Public Shelters

This Cold War film "Information Within Public Shelters" (1953) takes place in a fallout shelter, showing how a well-trained staff that provides information to shelter occupants, can keep them busy and calm during nuclear armageddon. This film was produced as the U.S. Government began to shift from promoting privately-owned "family" fallout shelters to the concept of large, public shelters.

Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1

A shocking political exposé, and an intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for survival, dignity, and justice after decades of top-secret human radiation experiments conducted on them by the U.S. government.

The Helsinki Effect

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was the starting point for the slow but sure collapse of communist authoritarian rule in Eastern Europe. The Helsinki Effect offers new perspectives on the events of the Cold War. The film tells the story of the CSCE process, which had a major impact on the end of the Cold War, and sheds light on secret top-level discussions behind closed doors, through voice simulations using artificial intelligence.

Camp Century: The Hidden City Beneath the Ice

How in 1959, during the heat of the Cold War, the government of the United States decided to create a secret military base located in the far north of Greenland: Camp Century, almost a real town with roads and houses, a nuclear plant to provide power and silos to house missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev Does America

The story of the unconditional, no-holds-barred tour of America by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, leader of World Communism and America's arch nemesis, during 13 sun-filled days in the fall of 1959.

Path to War

A powerful drama of soaring ambition and shattered dreams that takes a provocative insider's look at the way the USA goes to war—as seen from inside the LBJ White House leading up to and during the Vietnam War.

Rich Hall's Red Menace

2019 marks the 30th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Rich Hall examines the relationship between the West and the USSR in his inimitable fashion.

Tragedy or Hope

Contrasting radical mobs, anarchy, and 1960s counterculture with footage of American manufacturing and innovation, this film celebrates the concept of American exceptionalism and argues that anti-Vietnam War protesters were influenced by communism, atheism, and immorality. Set mostly in a university library, this political debate between a medical student, his 1770s ancestor, and a history professor is a sequel to the 1972 National Education Program film, Brink of Disaster! Two additional characters appear in this drama: a 19th-century steamboat captain, and the student’s grandfather - an early 20th-century automobile worker. The National Education Program at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas created a variety of widely-distributed anti-communism films from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s.

When the Water Stops Flowing

Jonathan Stavleu explores, in a stream-of-consciousness video essay, the relationship people have with water and what happens when access to it is taken away. For this work, he examines anecdotal histories he has heard from Estonians, as well as stories from his own family history in the Netherlands, weaving them together into a journal-like narrative.

Disco and Atomic War

A different history of the Cold War: how Estonians under Soviet tyranny began to feel the breeze of freedom when a group of anonymous dreamers successfully used improbable methods to capture the Finnish television signal, a window into Western popular culture, brave but harmless warriors who helped change the fate of an entire nation.

Die Mächtigste Bombe der Welt